1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to educational or diagnostic tools or games and, more particularly, relates to tools for evaluating or enhancing the matching, classifying, and/or labeling skills of very young children, autistic children, or other children with verbal communication limitations requiring physical and verbal cues to help them master information.
2. Discussion of the Related Art
All children acquire new information in various stages and at varying rates. Common to all children is the acquisition of at least a limited ability to match, classify, and label new information, and the subsequent integration of such information in their lives in a way in which it makes sense to them.
Young children with speech, language and other communication disorders go through the same stages of learning as all other children but often at a much slower pace. Such children often exhibit very low frustration thresholds, particularly when they are exposed to other children learning at faster rates. Frustration for these children is often increased by a lack of physical dexterity. Such children require educational tools that will assist and coach them so as to strengthen those skills which they already have while fostering independence. The best tools provide physical and visual cues to help them match, classify, and label information through simple physical manipulation of the tools and thus offer a distinct advantage to children who communicate best physically rather than verbally. Ideally, such tools should be adaptable to accommodate progress of individual students or to accommodate varying skill levels by making provision to vary the complexity of each task presented by the tool and/or by varying the number of tasks presented by the tool. Similar needs are presented with respect to diagnostic tools, i.e., the ideal diagnostic tool permits accurate testing of a student's matching, labeling, or classifying skills (1) using skills already possessed by such a student (2) without unnecessarily surpassing the student's frustration threshold.
Educational and/or diagnostic tools exhibiting one or more (but not all) of the above characteristics are widely distributed. One such series of tools, marketed by Watten/Poe Teaching Resource Center, presents calendars, charts, and graphs for use by students. Each such tool comprises a substrate on which is mounted one or more rows and/or columns of pockets. Each of the pockets is designed to receive cards bearing characters such as shapes, colors, numbers, etc. The student is assigned with the task of inserting the appropriate card in each of the pockets in order to enhance his or her communication skills. Such tools, while adequate for their purpose, are typically not well adapted for enhancing or evaluating matching classifying, or labeling skills because they typically do not provide a target serving as a basis for comparison for matching purposes. Moreover, the substrate on which the transparent pockets are mounted is typically rather filmsy and poorly suited for physical punishment which may be imposed on the tool by students having limited dexterity or students who became frustrated and lash out or otherwise mishandle the tool. Such tools also usually have a set format and cannot be readily adapted for different purposes such as classifying or matching different numbers of characters or advancing from relatively simple classification or matching tasks to more complex tasks.